A microprocessor, also known as a CPU (central processing unit), is a complete computation engine that controls a computer. Currently, internal CPU clocks speeds are fixed at the manufacturing facility via an internal fuse setting. These CPU speed settings cannot be changed after initial manufacture, test, and packaging. A large percentage of processors may be able to execute at its maximum clock speed capability. However, higher clock speeds may be charged for a premium price by a respective vendor. To enable lower cost effective CPUs in the market without cannibalizing the higher performance market segments, vendors tend to force slower speeds on devices that are fully capable of running at much higher speeds for markets that cannot justify a higher performance cost premium.
Many “new” market segments currently cannot justify the cost of the higher performance devices. In addition, many of those devices tend to have long life cycles (e.g., 5-6 years or more) and once they are deployed, the devices may not realistically and/or economically be returned for upgrade purposes. The fact that these markets are “new” often equates, initially, to limited sophistication and thus performance requirements. An end user may not be willing to pay for sophistication and its associated performance increase, performance increase that they don't yet know they need. However, it is understood that as the consumer slowly becomes more and more sophisticated, the demand for more services and thus performance will increase, along with the end user's willingness to pay for increased performance.
As a result, customers are caught in a predicament. They are deploying millions of devices of a 5-6 year product life cycle and those devices cannot be realistically returned for upgrade. Those devices may have minimal performance requirements today and may have dramatically increased performance requirements tomorrow. Evidence of this predicament is manifested by demands for high performance devices with low performance pricing.